


Uncanny Visitation

by tristesses



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dark, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-04
Updated: 2012-01-04
Packaged: 2017-10-28 21:29:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/312364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tristesses/pseuds/tristesses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Luna visits Rookwood in his cell in Azkaban. He doesn't know why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Uncanny Visitation

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written on 5/30/2008 for vikingcarrot, using her art [here](http://vikingcarrot.livejournal.com/371037.html#cutid1) as a prompt.

Time in Azkaban doesn't creep by so much as not exist at all. No clocks, no windows, no way to sense the seasonal swells in magic as the earth rotates, just the blankness of the grey walls, the solid tromping footsteps of the guards outside his door, and the infinitesimal growth of his yellowed fingernails. In fact, he's divided time up into fragmented days based on his nails; his version of midnight's when they get too long and he scrapes them down the stone wall until they snap off and bleed, then it's morning, broken like every morning since he's been in this shithole of a prison. The calluses have built on the tips of his fingers now, and he's pretty sure the constant abuse has made his nail beds permanently infected. He doesn't care. At least it alleviates the boredom.

Sometimes he only stares vacantly at the grey wall and sits on his slatted bed. His fingers flick imaginary cards at phantom players whose drugged whiskey and general stupidity make them the best targets for schemes like his. He takes their money and fucks their women and sometimes kills them if they're Mudbloods (he likes the slither of fresh intestines in his hands, the looks on their faces as they ooze their diseased muck onto the dirt) or if they rub him the wrong way – or the right way, then try to go blab about it. (It's especially amusing when they think he loves them, and some do. Some really think it. _Fools_. They're better off dead. Do the world a favor, take them out of it. Clean up the bloodline.)

But this is all in his head, and his playacting (no matter how clever) won't really hide the monotony of this pathetic waste of a life, this so-called merciful gift the high and mighty Minister of Fuckall's given him. Rookwood paces his cell, gnaws his chapped lips. He is certain he will die soon. This boredom will kill him.

 ****

. . .

She brings him a ribbon for his hair, which is fucking ridiculous. No guards follow her into his cell, and she doesn't have a wand, so he considers wrapping the black velvet around her pale little throat and yanking until she's blue in the face and her eyes and tongue are bulging. But no, there's a catch, there's always a catch. She looks familiar, although all pretty blondes look the same to him, they're just things to be had, and she's too young to have ever been someone significant or a danger to him. That could just be her eyes, though, wide and blue and misty like she's drunk, but she doesn't wobble and he can't smell the stink of firewhiskey anywhere around her (and trust his word, he knows from firewhiskey) and she's too calm by far. He doesn't trust her.

"What's this, girlie?" he asks her, dangling the ribbon in front of her face, smacking her lightly on the cheek with it. She doesn't react other than to blink up at him. Disappointing. "Bringing me a present as a token of appreciation?"

"You always wear your hair back," she tells him. Still that misty-dislocated expression, like she's not quite paying attention to the world in front of her. "I thought you would like it."

He should know her, he really should, if she's known him well enough to know how he wears his hair. Fuck. He growls and steps forward, a movement that would become a stalk if he weren't trapped in this tiny Merlin-forsaken stone box. The girl moves back a step, seemingly unperturbed. He sneers and flings the ribbon to the brick at her feet.

"Take it back, I don't want it," he snarls, and turns to flop on his bed, feeling oddly like a petulant teenager in a fight with his Hogwarts girlfriend. He hates the sensation, and besides, he never had a girlfriend at Hogwarts, only Rodolphus and a few third-years who knew better than to say no. "Fucking useless thing." A pause, a sneer. "So is the ribbon."

There's a pause from the doorway – he can feel her considering – then she says, thoughtfully, "Next time I'll bring you tobacco. You smoke, don't you?"

(If she's seen him before it must have been in battle. Some time after the frenzy, when he could laugh and smoke and tread in the spilled blood and guts of whatever Mudbloods he'd killed that day.)

"Anyway," she continues, like he really gives a damn about what she's saying, "tobacco is good for you. It keeps the Snargles away. I don't think you need anymore negative interference in your life, do you?"

Rookwood sits up, slow and deadly, turns a gleaming smirk on the blonde who watches him calmly. There's not a hint of worry in her face. Stupid girl.

"Who was it, pretty?" he asks, and she cocks her head as if in question. "Your dad? Your mum? Family, friends? Who was it laid in the dirt by dear old Rookwood's wand? You tell me."

He thinks there's a flicker of something in her face, but it's gone before he can truly register what it is, and she only says, "A friend. You killed a friend of mine."

"And then I feasted on his bones, girl," he says, but she's already slipped out the door, quietly as a ghost. Maybe she is a ghost, maybe he's hallucinating after all.

But no, it can't be. The black ribbon lies on the stone like a snake, curled and stark against the pale grey as a tattoo against flesh. Real. Rookwood rubs his left arm – it still twinges occasionally, mostly from memories long past and associations he doesn't consciously make – and thinks about tobacco, and the guts of this girl's friends strewn about the dirt like so much garbage.


End file.
